December 7, 2008

Then We Came To The End by Joshua Ferris

No one knows us quite the same way as the men and women who sit beside us in department meetings and crowd the office refrigerator with their labeled yogurts. Every office is a family of sorts, and the ad agency Joshua Ferris brilliantly depicts in his debut novel is family at its strangest and best, coping with a business downturn in the time-honored way: through gossip, pranks, and increasingly frequent coffee breaks.With a demon's eye for the details that make life worth noticing, Joshua Ferris tells a true and funny story about survival in life's strangest environment--the one we pretend is normal five days a week. (from Barnes and Noble)

I can't recommend this book enough! I loved it. It had me both laughing and crying. I worked in a department store for 5 years and this book brought to mind so many memories I have of that time. We were a group of diverse people and we spent more time with each other than we did with our families. Some of us got along great--AND got married (it's where I met WD)--and some of us despised each other. A lot of us despised each other. It's where someone kept taking my ladder out of my stockroom and where someone dumped all my merchandise on the floor and then took my cart and where someone kept stealing my cookies. But only these sons of guns would understand the weight of these problems--not my family. Isn't that funny? Work. Ha ha. Go read this book.


1 comments:

angie said...

Did I really read this during the few days I was on vacation at your house?!

I loved it. I remember crying, too. But, I don't remember anything sad about it. Maybe the characters just seemed so real that I was just reacting to the fact they "came to the end."